ABSTRACT

Child maltreatment (or child abuse and neglect) is a common area of interest in clinical child psychology. Research has examined the causes and consequences as well as the myriad risk factors and interventions that are effective in supporting child maltreatment victims and families. Child maltreatment is unique, however, from the study of disorders and even other kinds of adversity in that the scientific interest is shared across many disciplines including but not limited to, social welfare, medicine, law, and biology. As a result, the current state of the field although robust, is limited by a lack of shared definitions, common approaches to research and inclusion of widely differing sample types making the results often nonreproducible and of limited generalizability. The goal of the current paper is to provide clinical child and adolescent psychologists a guide to the complexity of child maltreatment research and to suggest possible solutions to navigate the challenges associated with research on child maltreatment. The manuscript provides suggestions that researchers could follow to ensure that mistakes from the past are not repeated and so that clinical psychology can contribute to the field with the most robust research for this significantly important public health issue.

摘要

虐待儿童（或虐待和忽视儿童）是临床儿童心理学的一个共同关注领域。研究调查了原因和后果以及无数的风险因素和有效支持儿童虐待受害者和家庭的干预措施。然而，虐待儿童不同于对疾病​​甚至其他类型逆境的研究，因为许多学科都有共同的科学兴趣，包括但不限于社会福利、医学、法律和生物学。因此，该领域的当前状况虽然稳健，但由于缺乏共同的定义、共同的研究方法以及包含广泛不同的样本类型而受到限制，使得结果往往不可重复且普遍性有限。本文的目的是为临床儿童和青少年心理学家提供有关儿童虐待研究的复杂性的指南，并提出可能的解决方案，以应对与儿童虐待研究相关的挑战。该手稿提供了研究人员可以遵循的建议，以确保过去的错误不会重演，从而临床心理学可以通过针对这一极其重要的公共卫生问题的最有力的研究为该领域做出贡献。